Where we keep St. Bonaventure University's history

It must be February!

What is it about February? While it is hard to tell that winter is here this year, the usual hubbub of activity is definitely present.

Of course, midterm time has come for our students and work schedules adjust accordingly as desperate study sessions come into play. But it’s also a time for research with capstone projects coming up sooner that folks had realized and a slew of outside requests for information. Genealogists and sports historians are popping up and we even had a scholar here for four days last week investigating the history of religious education and educators.

All this reminds us of why we’re actually here. It isn’t just to process the continuing stream of new material (and that backlog!) but to make it available for exactly the purposes all these people are using it for. An ancillary benefit of this burst of use of the collection is that it has brought to the surface a number of those backlogged items which are now being processed. It also pointed out some material in those collections that we weren’t aware of at all. It means that next time we go digging for an answer our finding aids will be even more effective at giving us a complete view of what we actually have.